My camera is kaput! I love the word kaput. Not exactly an onomatopoeia but I find the sound of this German word quite descriptive. You don't even have to speak that language to understand "Meine Kamera ist kaputt." Cool word, bad situation for a blogger.
I remember my first camera. A Kodak Instamatic, it was a birthday present when I turned eight. I took pictures of my family, of squirrels in the woods, of flowering trees...all in black and white. A roll of film came in 12 or 24 exposures. It sometimes took forever to fill up a 24 roll because you didn't want to "waste" a shot. Often one roll would contain Christmas pictures from two different years.
After the roll will full, it had to be sent away to be developed. Oh, sure, you could take it to a shop where they'd develop the pictures but that was so expensive. Actually it was never cheap to get the pictures developed. I remember paying almost $4.00 per roll way back in the '60s.
When we got married, my husband wanted a good 35 mm camera. He took photography classes and bought equipment to develop his own pictures. He's still a good photographer today.
I loved my digital camera when I got it back in 1999. It was point and shoot, no more dials and settings to figure out. The pictures were so clear and crisp and so much better than I ever took before. The camera was small enough to slip in my purse so I used it a lot.
Knowing what to do with the pictures once they were taken has been a challenge. Early on, they were saved on floppy disks, then a zip disk and now on CDs. Each time I updated a computer, I had to transfer my photos to the new media. I hope CDs stay around for a while.
I'm going backwards now because I want a digital camera that has all the dials and settings and 100 lenses. Well, maybe not 100 lenses but I'm hoping my husband will spring for two. It has always bothered me that I couldn't take close-up pictures with my old camera.
Several of my blogging friends have recently gotten new cameras so I'm going to look through their posts to see what they like about theirs. I know replacing my camera isn't going to make me a great photographer; in fact, I'll probably be worse for a while. Hang on, it's going to be a bumpy ride.
